With the help of cofounder David Mifsud and their mom Jenny, Doan
and Galbraith grew their business from $1.7 million in revenues in
2011 to $10 million
in 2013. They expect to continue growing 100% to 200%
year-over-year.

The quilting company has become the largest employer in their
hometown of Hamilton, Missouri, as well as the entire county. In
the past year and a half, they've gone from 40 to 180 employees,
Doan says.

It all started when Doan and Galbraith decided to find a way to
bring their parents some supplemental income after their father
not only lost his job as a mechanic for the Kansas City Star in
2008 but lost most of his retirement savings in the stock market
crash that year.

While neither sibling
was a quilter, their mom had recently picked up the hobby.
Doan called his childhood friend Mifsud, a financial planner with
whom he'd previously started some small businesses, to help them
get a quilting company off the ground.

It turned out quilting was a profitable niche waiting to be
filled, and by 2012 all three cofounders committed full-time to
the Missouri Star Quilt Company. The company sells a massive
selection of pre-cut fabrics for quilters, and offers quick
turnaround custom quilting services.

Doan and Galbraith's mom Jenny began regularly uploading quilting
tutorials to YouTube, and soon built a fanbase of quilting
enthusiasts from around the world. Many of her weekly videos
bring in hundreds of thousands of views, and six have exceeded 1
million views.

Mifsud says the tutorials, the variety and affordability of their
products, and their fostering of local and online communities
have been responsible for their growth.

Doan adds that from a management perspective, they clicked when
they began trusting their employees more.

They began to "put people into autonomous silos, where they could
create, succeed or fail, and not have us helicoptering over
them," Doan says.

Jenny Doan's tutorials
have become the go-to videos for quilters around the
world.YouTube/Missouri Star Quilt
Company

The cofounders started their business in Hamilton largely out of
convenience to their family, but quickly noticed its positive
effect on the community. They decided that as they grew, they
would remain there rather than expanding to a big city.

The Doan family moved from California to Hamilton, a small town
of 1,500 people, in 1995. "When we got there, there were a lot of
things happening," Galbraith says. "As the years went by, it just
started dying. People started moving away, and hardly anything
was going on. The economy in Hamilton couldn't support itself."

"We recreated some of the reasons to stick around," Doan says. "I
mean, we could go somewhere else and rent a factory and become an
internet company, but we saw a lot of value in investing millions
of dollars back into our community — build buildings that line
our streets and create those 180 jobs in this tiny town."

The Missouri Star Quilt Company has one warehouse and six quilt
shops, with seven more under construction, which they hope to
have completed by the end of the year. Mifsud says it's all part
of a plan to turn Hamilton into "Quilt Town, USA."

"We have people locally that continue to drive value to us," Doan
explains. "The social effect of that for the people who live here
is something you can't recreate."